How Bill Gates Works

ZZeta writes "What's a day like for the richest man on Earth? In this Fortune interview, Bill Gates explains what he does on his average workday. Most interesting? He is not into some of Outlook's features, such as to-do lists and email notification. Also, he works with three monitors and is looking forward to buying a digital whiteboard next year." I was interested in how he gets his e-mail filtered. Hey Bill, if you read this, I'll totally put you on my e-mail whitelist!

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Wrong Desktop

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Maybe Gates is more down to earth than we'd thought?

That's the receptionist's desk. His gold plated, diamond studded, virgin Brazilian hardwood desk with human skull feet and bone handles is in his office. It only has one monitor on it's running enlightenment because he got tired of mousing over three desktops and the HVAC hurricane it took to cool it all off.

Some things never change. There's not much paper on this desk either, though he did use a mac. To do lists are for people who have real tasks. One day, if he ever has something to really do and a calendar program with better todo list integration than Outlook, he'll understand how silly his "folder" organization is.

No one should take this man as a model of how to get things done, but they do. All the tasks that you and I have to do, he simply tells someone else to do. Email is everything to him. The level of control this man personally exercises over the work habits of people in big dumb companies is astounding. He's completely out of touch with real world activities, yet he exercises crazy micro control of Microsoft and Windows development. Perhaps this is one of the more important reasons M$ has yet to ship Vista. Down to Earth? Sure, if you consider your head shoved up your ass a down poisition.

Then and Now.

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Then and Now. Still not much paper, real tasks to do or any connection with the reality of daily work. It's amazing anyone would take this man's advice about doing anything but bossing people around. Forbes, once again, lives up to it's reputation of business school porn. You might as well read a playboy centerfold's essays.